When it comes to making cancer treatment more efficient and effective, two heads are certainly better than one—as evidenced by a new partnership between GE Healthcare and Sophia Genetics.
The health tech powerhouses are joining forces to build an analytics platform that matches patients to the best possible treatment regimens for their specific genomic signature, cancer type and lifelong health record.
To do so, the partners will merge their existing technologies: Sophia’s artificial intelligence-powered genomic analysis platform will be deployed alongside GE’s medical imaging and monitoring tools.
GE’s contribution will include access to its own AI-fueled Edison data aggregation platform. The system is designed to bring together healthcare data from a variety of sources, then use AI to help hospitals analyze and break down that data however they need, allowing them, for example, to design their own patient workflows and compare treatment plans of individual patients.
Ultimately, the combined solution will give healthcare providers and biopharmaceutical companies access to cancer patients’ electronic health records, lab test results, genomic sequencing data and information collected by connected medical devices all in one centralized location.
That pooled data can then be used not only to select and develop more effective treatment plans specific to each patient, but also to inform the design of biopharma researchers’ clinical trials and help them recruit the patients with the highest potential benefit from an experimental treatment.
“The integration of genomics-based artificial intelligence into oncology workflow solutions would be a major breakthrough for integrated cancer medicine and for future clinical research, which increasingly depend on the ability to select those patients most likely to respond to new therapies,” said Jan Makela, president and CEO of GE Healthcare’s imaging business.
The partnership comes not long after Sophia’s DDM platform—named after its approach to data-driven medicine—received a major funding boost in the form of a nine-figure series F round.
The Swiss data firm brought in $110 million, led by aMoon and Hitachi Ventures, which brought Sophia’s lifetime financing to around $250 million over the last decade.
The funding is being used to expand the platform’s technological capabilities. At the time, the company said its platform was already in use by more than 1,000 healthcare institutions around the world who are using Sophia’s machine learning to help guide treatment plans and identify biomarkers and appropriate patients for clinical trials.